The Bossier banner., 1887-10-06
T'ALMAGE'S SERMON.
True Christian Character as Devel-
oped in Women.

rhe Royal Traits Of Mercy and Eenevo-
lence Abundantly Demonstrated in
Their Lives In Acting as Gods
Ministering Angels.
The seventh of Rev T. Dewitt Talmage's
course of sermons at "The Hamptons,"
was tribute to the noble and con-
spicuous place woman has taken as the
almoners of God in dispensing his mercies
to those most in need of them. His text
was:
There are three-score Queens.-Solomon's
Song, vi, s.
So Solomon, by one stroke, set forth the
imperial character of true Christian
woman. She is not a slave, not hireling,
not a subordinate, but Queen; and in
my text Solomon sees sixty of these help
ing to make up the royal pageant of Jesus.
In former sermon showed you that
crown and courtly attendants and inn
perial wardrobe were not necessary to
make Queen; but that graces of the
heart and life will give coronation to any
woman. l showed you at some length
that woman's position was higher in the
world than mans, and that, although she
had often been denied the right of suf-
frage, she always did vote and always
would vote by her influence; and that her
chief desire ought to be that she should
have grace rightly to rule in the dominion
which she has already won. began an
enumeration of some of her rights, and
this morning resume the subject.
In the first place, women has the special
and superlative- right-not again going
back to what have already said-woman
has the special and superlative right Of
blessing and comforting the sick.
What land, what street, what house, has
not felt the smitings of disease? Tens Of
thousands of sickbeds! What shall we do
with them? Shall man, with his rough
hand and clumsy foot, go stumbling
around the sick-room trying to soothe the
distracted nerves, and alleviate the pains
of the tossing patient? The young man
at college may scoff at the idea of being
under maternal influences; but at the first
blast Of the typhoid fever ON his cheek he
says: "Where is mother?" Walter Scott
wrote partly in satire and partly in COM
pliment when he said:
o woman, in our hours of ease,
Uncertain, coy and hard to please;
When pain and anguish wiring the brow,
ministering ang, thou.
think the most pathetic passages in all
the Bible is the description Of the lad who
went out to the harvest-field of Shunem
and got sunstruck-throwingh his hands on
his temples and crying out: "Oh, my
head! my head!" and they said: "Carry
him to his mother" And then the record
is: "He sat on her knee till noon and then
died."
1t is an awful thing to be ill away from
home in strange hotel; once in awhile
men coming in to look at you, holding
their hand over their mouth for fear they
will catch the contagion. How roughly
they turn you in bed. How loudly they
talk. How you long for the ministeries Of
home. knew one such who went away
from one of the brightest of homes for
several weeks business absence at the
West. A telegram came at midnight that
he was on his death-bed, far away from
home. By express train the wife and
daughters went westward, but they were
too late. He feared not to die, but he was
In an agony to live until his family got
there. He tried to bribe the doctor to
make him live a little while longer.
He said: 81 am willing to die, but
not alone" But the pulses fluttered, the
eyes closed and the heart stopped The
and daughters going westward-lifeless
remains Of husband and father coming
eastward. Oh, it was sad, pitiful, over
%helming spectaclel When we are sick
we want to be sick at home. When the
time comes for US to die, we want to die at
home. The room may be very humble,
and the faces that look into ours NAV be
very plain; but who cares for that? Low.
ing hands to bathe the temples. Loving
voices to speak good cheer. Loving lips
to read the comforting promises of Jesus.
In eur last dreadful war men cast the
cannon; men fashioned the musketry !:
men cried to the hosts: eForward,
march" men hurled their battalions on
the sharp edges of the enemy, crying:
"Charge! chargew but woman scraped
the lint; woman administered the cordials ;
woman watched by the dying couch ;
woman wrote the last message to the
home circle;, woman wept at the solitary
burial attended by herself and four men
with aspade.
We greeted the General home with brass
bands, and triumphal arches, and wild
huzzas; but the story is too good to be
written anywhere, save in the chronicles
OF Heaven, of Mrs. Brady, who came down
among the sick in the swamps of the
Chickahominy; of Annie Ross, in the
cooper shop hospital; of Margaret Breck-
inridge, who came to men who had been
for weeks with their wounds undressed,
some of them frozen to the ground, and
when she turned them over, those that had
an arm left waved it and filled the air with
their ehurrah;" of Mrs. Hodge, who came
from Chicago with blankets and with pil-
lows, until the men shouted: 'Three cheers
for the Christian Commission! God bless
the women at home," then sitting down to
take thelast message: "Tell my wife not to
fret about me, but to meet me in Heaven.
Tell her to train up the boys whom we
have loved SO well. Tell her we shall
meet again in the good land.
Tell her to bear my loss like the Christian
wife of a Christian soldier;" and of Mrs.
Shelton, into whose face the convalescent
soldier looked and said: Your grapes and
cologne cured me-" Men did their work
with shot and shell, and carbine, and how.
itzer. Women did their work with socks,
and slippers, and bandages and warm
drinks, and Scripture texts, and gentle